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Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

It's not electricity. It's energy. Electricity is just a medium for transferring energy from source to destination. The amount of usable energy at our disposal is proportional to the level of technological advancement. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

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My sentiment exactly! We are dependent on energy itself. Numerous projects have proven themselves feasible for generating energy in a cheap & clean fashion. However, with all companies out to "make a buck", such innovations often get swept under the carpet. Example? Think back to the decision of the motor vehicle industry's choice to offer hydrogen-powered vehicles instead of water-powered ones.

Water-powered vehicles? WTF?

Boiled water, rather

Ah, okay, steam powered cars I've seen before. Of course, they're not so much water powered as they are wood powered. The steam car is no more water powered than my car is axle powered.

Still, now I'm wondering about the fuel efficiency of a steam powered station wagon. How much wood would a wood-Woody burn if a wood-Woody would burn wood?

Steam engines generally have terrible efficiency, at least at small scale. At large scale they do well (lots of power plants are basically steam engines), but smaller scale means higher output temperature, less equipment to capture energy, etc. Wikipedia says that an engine that exhausts the used steam to the atmosphere will be 1-10% efficient, as compared with ~25% for a normal gasoline engine and 40-50% for electrical generation engines.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of a successful, water powered car. Are they converting the water into a lower energy state, a la Ice 9? Or are they reacting the water with some other material, like cesium? Though I guess that make it more of a cesium powered car than a water powered car.

Regarding water-powered vehicles, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car

Solar power will bring us from a Type I society to Type II... eventually

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